This week I was in London, attending the New Fellows Seminar at the Royal Society. This was a fairly low-key event preceding the formal admissions ceremony; for instance, it is not publicised on their web site. The format was very interesting: they had each of the new Fellows of the Society give a brief (15 minute) presentation of their work in quick succession, in a manner which would be accessible to a diverse audience in the physical and life sciences. The result was a wonderful two-day seminar on the state of the art in many areas of physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, medicine, and mathematics. For instance, I learnt

Why modern aircraft (such as the Dreamliner and A380) are now assembled using (incredibly tough and waterproofed) adhesives instead of bolts or welds, and how adhesion has been enhanced by nanoparticles;

How recent advances in machine learning and image segmentation (including graph cut methods!) now allow computers to identify and track many general classes of objects (e.g. people, cars, animals) simultaneously in real-world images and video, though not quite in real-time yet;

… and 42 other topics like this. (One strongly recurrent theme in the life science talks was just how much recent genomic technologies, such as the genome projects of various key species, have accelerated (by several orders of magnitude!) the ability to identify the genes, proteins, and mechanisms that underlie any given biological function or disease. To paraphrase one speaker, a modern genomics lab could now produce the equivalent of one 1970s PhD thesis in the subject every minute.)

I gave a non-technical talk today to the local chapter of the Pi Mu Epsilon society here at UCLA. I chose to talk on the cosmic distance ladder – the hierarchy of rather clever (yet surprisingly elementary) mathematical methods that astronomers use to indirectly measure very large distances, such as the distance to planets, nearby stars, or distant stars. This ladder was really started by the ancient Greeks, who used it to measure the size and relative locations of the Earth, Sun and Moon to reasonable accuracy, and then continued by Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler who then measured distances to the planets, and in the modern era to stars, galaxies, and (very recently) to the scale of the universe itself. It’s a great testament to the power of indirect measurement, and to the use of mathematics to cleverly augment observation.

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